[Article] Voynich Paleography article

[-JKP-]

Small question: f67r2 has text in a red ink, and is that writing in the same hand as the rest?

It's probably the same scribe. It's essentially the same letterforms. The red pigment may be a little harder to control, a slightly different consistency that tends more toward skips and fill-in.

The distinctions between the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. scribe and the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. are very marked, they really stand out... different shapes, different slant, different spacing, different size, different pen speed. In contrast, f67r2 brown and red text varies much less, and the variations appear to be pigment-related.

[LisaFaginDavis]

Hi, everyone,

I am very pleased to announce that the embargo on my article "How Many Glyphs and How Many Scribes? Digital Paleography and the Voynich Manuscript" has been lifted and it is now open access! If you're interested, you can download it here:

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- Lisa

[Aga Tentakulus]

Yes, it looks good.

What I don't understand, embargo ?!

[LisaFaginDavis]

It just means that for this journal all articles are only available to subscribers for the first year after publication (that's the "embargo" period) and then they become open access. It's now been 12 months since it was published, so now it is available free of charge.

[Gab19]

Honestly, most people in my field of manuscript studies won't ever have read anything about the VMS other than what they've seen online and in social media, so they are finding it fascinating and somewhat surprising to learn that the manuscript can in fact be studied using the methodologies of medieval paleography and codicology.

Isn’t it a bit “snobbish”? Only because the manuscript is interesting to people that are not academics, it doesn’t diminish its value.

[Koen G]

I'd find it snobbish if its popular appeal were the only deterrent. But the VM is also an incredibly difficult object of study, and various serious researchers have made a fool of themselves with their VM theories.

All the more credit to Lisa, Claire etc for breaking this perception. They show that of you know what you're doing and manage to keep a clear mind, the VM can be studied academically.

[LisaFaginDavis]

Thank you, Koen. That's exactly what I'm trying to do: until recently, most traditional academics wouldn't come near the Voynich for fear of damaging their reputation or their chance at tenure. I'm trying to help change that attitude so that the academic world will take the manuscript, and those who work on it, more seriously.

[Koen G]

I also loved how your lecture for "Voynich week" at Yale was peppered with explicit warnings against becoming a theorist. Got to teach them young!

[RobGea]

Hi LisaFaginDavis,
I was wondering is it possible to say anything about the skill level of the scribes ?
More specifically:

a) Do all 5 have a similar skill level at writing text ?

b) If there was a scale, sort of like 0-for a beginner to 10- for a professional scribe, would it be possible to attribute a rough value to the scribes skills and what would that value be ?

[LisaFaginDavis]

Hi LisaFaginDavis,
I was wondering is it possible to say anything about the skill level of the scribes ?
More specifically:

a) Do all 5 have a similar skill level at writing text ?

b) If there was a scale, sort of like 0-for a beginner to 10- for a professional scribe, would it be possible to attribute a rough value to the scribes skills and what would that value be ?

These are great questions, but really difficult to answer. I tend to think of Scribe 1 as the most "legible" (which is, of course, a ridiculous word to use when referring to a fundamentally non-legible script), that is, the easiest to transcribe. So by that standard, I might say that Scribe 1 is the "best" of them. This scribe's writing is broadly spaced and seems to have been written more slowly and carefully.

On the other hand, the work of Scribe 1 includes a large number of inconsistencies and "mistakes" (by which I mean glyphs that are not consistent with the way Voynichese tends to be written). The work of Scribe 2 includes relatively few of these inconsistencies. So perhaps that means that Scribe 2 is "better" than Scribe 1. 

I think it is impossible to truly compare or classify the various scribes relative to one another without being able to read what they're writing. Only then will we be able to judge how good each scribe is at conveying the content they are trying to preserve.